Press Release

Online Tech Achieves HIPAA Compliance at All Data Centers

Ann Arbor, MI, September 15, 2011 --(PR.com)-- Online Tech has added HIPAA compliance to its growing list of successfully completed audits. Online Tech achieved compliance across all 54 HIPAA citations and the complete set of 136 audited components when audited by an independent Certified HIPAA Professional (CHP) and Certified Health Security Specialist (CHSS).

The HITECH Act, coupled with sizeable fines enforced by Health and Human Services, has brought HIPAA compliance into sharp focus across the healthcare industry. Both the patient facing entities, and the business associates and IT vendors that support them, are all corporately and personally responsible for the protection, availability, and security of protected health information (PHI). The entire spectrum of health related companies - from hospitals and physician health organizations to Software-as-a-Service and electronic medical records (EMR) providers – must meet HIPAA compliance.

“We’ve built a world class data center business keeping mission critical applications secure and available 24x7,” says Mike Klein, President and COO of Online Tech. “Our focus demands a commitment to repeatable, audited processes for everything we do. A certified HIPAA audit was a natural next step to our audit process to give our health care and health IT clients even greater peace of mind.”

Online Tech has lead the secure hosting market with a legacy of successful audits, starting with the SAS 70, SSAE 16, and SOC 2 & SOC 3 reports required on Service Organization Controls to meet Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) compliance. With its growth in healthcare clients, Online Tech invested aggressively to achieve HIPAA compliant hosting to meet the increasing demand.

Online Tech’s compliant data centers have already helped health care and health IT companies meet the HIPAA requirements of the HITECH Act. Biotronic, a company specializing in real-time neurophysical intraoperative monitoring services for hospitals across the United States, moved their IT infrastructure to Online Tech's HIPAA compliant data centers to ensure constant uptime during these critical surgeries. “The redundancy, power and battery backups, and people onsite gives me the confidence that everything will be up and running,” shares Judson Pitt, CIO of Biotronic.

A Michigan group of surgeons, Michigan Multispecialty Physicians, recently leveraged Online Tech's HIPAA compliant hosting and managed services to meet the application availability demands of HIPAA compliance. They were also able to put their former data center space to more profitable use and realize faster response times to their patient-facing users.

“Being in healthcare, we have special needs for dealing with HIPAA compliance to provide business continuity, disaster recovery, security of the data, and restricting access to the data both physically and across the network,” explains Erik Yochum, Director of Information Technology of MMP. “Online Tech has different power, network, and connectivity feeds coming in so that they can provide different ways of accessing the data. So if we have a power outage, we have access to our data and systems for patient care.”

“The essence of HIPAA compliance addresses the absolute necessity that patient health information must always be private, secure, and available -- all things we strive to provide to every client in our data center,” says Yan Ness, CEO of Online Tech. “Most of our documented processes exceeded HIPAA requirements, allowing us to move through the audit process incredibly smoothly and quickly.”